Premières : The Speckled People

HISTORY (through the story)

The story began during the 50’s in Dublin.

The narrator, who was born in 1953, i.e. just after the Second World war, was a little boy raised in a german-irish family.

At this time in history, the Republic of Ireland wanted to prove its independence by a strong nationalism (cf the narrator’s father in the story).

As a result, being half Irish but mainly half german was very difficult to endure for a seven-year-old boy.

In this book, Hugo Hamilton jungles in a disconcerting and at the same time emotional way with the past in order to expose the story of his childhood.

He wonderfuly handles the art of flashbacks.

Indeed, the way how he tells us the story of his grandparents is simply amazing.

 Félix, Jehan, Mylène & Vivien

THE CHARACTERS

The children: Hugo, Franz and Maria.

The mother: Irmgard; she grew up in Kempen. She was raped by her boss (Stigler) when she was younger. She’s homesick because she’s German, so she’s unhappy, but always lovely, nice.

The father: Jack; he was a school teacher. He’s very nationalist, so strange and violent. We know that he comes from Cork and works as an engineer in Dublin and writes his name in Irish. When he was young, Ireland was still under British ruling, his father’s family were all fishermen.

Grandmother (to the mother): Berta Kaiser : opera singer.

Grandfather (to the mother) : Franz Kaiser.

Grandfather (to the father): John, a nationalist, sailor of the British Navy. He fell on deck one day and lost his memory and died not long after that, in a hospital, in Cork city.

Grandmother (for the father): Mary Frances.

At the time of the story, all grandparents are dead. But there’s no photo of the grandparents on the side of the father.

Uncle Ted: He’s the younger brother of the father. He gave candies to the children each time he met them and he is a priest.

Uncle Gerd: He’s the brother of the mother. He refused to be a nazi.

Aunt Marianne: She’s the sister of the mother, and has a daughter called Christianne.

We can think that the mother was fed up with the father and that she wanted to go back to her country with her children. But the father threatened her, so she obeyed.

We don’t know if the narrator gets along well with his sister and brother because we don’t know what he thinks about them.

 Eve, Laura, Lisa & Tiphaine

Narrative strategy

In this book, which is an indirect autobiography, Hugo Hamilton -via his narrator- tells us about the situation in Northern Ireland just after the Second World War. Indeed, his mother is German and he was raised as if he was responsible of what happened during the war. This story of a multicultural childhood gives us a new vision of the situation in Northern Ireland.

At first, nothing shows that it is an autobiography; it's shaped like a fiction about the situation in Ireland. The narrator gives a complete description of every event, and also lets us feel what he feels at every moment. Therefore, we can understand that this work is the story of his life; however, Hugo Hamilton doesn’t let his adult side be part of the story – or only very subtly –, he only writes this book through the eyes of a child, the child that he was back. He talks about all the problems and the difficulties naively; he doesn’t know how serious the things are. The narrator gives the story as he hears it from his father or his mother, what he hears and sees is what he understands, what he remembers and also what he tells us.

Through this narrative strategy, the reader gets really attached to this innocent child who is living in this heated environment. Indeed, the fact that he and his brothers are half German make them be mocked and bullied by the other children as "Nazis.” Also, because everyone speaks English outside, but their father had totally forbidden the English language inside his home, they have to speak Irish or German. They live in a constant conflict between two worlds; the one their parents create at home, which is a multicultural where they try to make their two cultures coexist: the children wear Lederhosen and Aran sweaters; and the one outside, where everyone speaks English and where they are seen as “different” and where they are not accepted. They are also at the heart of a conflict between their two parents over intolerance and violence, and the vision they have of their “home”, they disagree on how to live. These difficulties make this narrator be even more touching, because everything he’s living doesn’t seem to shock him, or to ruin his happiness full of simple things. As he starts to refuse his father's language lessons, using whatever weapons a child can use - illness, anger, silence, naughtiness - he loses that firm patriarchal sense of direction, but finds that there might be advantages at being lost...

Klara

The narrator/ narrative strategy

In this book, what is striking is probably the narrative strategy. Indeed, the book is not written in a normal way. The author chose to write his book with a child's eye vision. The story is told with the experience, the language, the point of view of a little boy. As he said, « he was a child who knew nothing  already». The facts are related, with the tact, the innocence, the truthfulness, and the judgement of a child. It may be the whole originality of the book. Futhermore, the facts are related in such a way that we can't really know if the novel is truly an autobiography, or if some facts are a bit exaggerated, or simply made-up. Thus, we are on both sides, in order to know if the novel is a kind of autobiography, fiction, or also a mix of both.

In the end, we can infer that the narrator's choice of adopting a child eye's vision allows the reader to make his own judgement, his own interpretation of the story, on how he understands it. The mix between an autobiography and a fiction makes the story particulary original.

Nathalie

The narrator and narrative strategy:

First, we have to say that this novel is an autobiography written by Hugo Hamilton. Even though, it is Hamilton, an adult, who wrote this book, we read this book and discover Ireland throughout a child’s eyes. It may be original to use that process. Indeed, thanks to his strategy of narration, the character seems to be a candid, and an innocent child. When you read this book, you, more or less, go back to your childhood. Thus, you may change your world’s vision and adopt his strategy. Hamilton used, of course, the first person.

Second, in his book Hamilton uses an internal point of view. Indeed he takes a child’s vision, his eyes. The narrator gives us the impression that he knows nothing about his destiny , in spite of the fact that he has already lived it. This is a kind of return in the past, and even if doesn't remember everything, he succeeds in imagining a realistic dialogue which matches his story and so his life. So we can say that this book is also a kind of fiction on the one hand and a realistic one on the other hand. As we can read in the Speckled People, there is a mix of direct and indirect speech. We can suppose that he used indirect speech when he perhaps forgot important details that would give meaning to his questioning.

Then, Hamilton uses another strategy. Indeed, it is hard to know if he uses the process of convincing or that of persuading. Throughout the book, you may see that Hugo Hamilton is playing on feelings, impressions and it may catch you inside the story.

On the one hand, the narrator tries to convince us with rational and reasonable arguments. In his book, Hamilton speaks a lot about the History of Germany. Indeed, he often makes a reference to the Second World War, Nazism and the difficulties that his mother faced/encountered. The mother has a past which may be hard to understand for Irish people. It may not have been simple to include her in their world. As a consequence, we could say that Hugo’s mother is the symbol of the problems that German people have to live with after the war. Of course, they were not all guilty, but to many (and some Irish people included), only their nationality mattered. So, we may say that Hugo Hamilton tries to convince us, alluding to History, which is represented by his mother.

On the other hand, we could feel that Hamilton also tries to persuade us. Indeed, he is himself, the stereotype of the bullying, the teasing, and the nastiness that people between two cultures may be confronted to. Moreover, he is a German person and the story happened some years after the end of WW2. You will see that people are still aware of that thing and that swastikas appeared on the narrator’s road. Thus, every day, he suffered from those things and he may want to touch/affect us with those feelings since they were the problems he was faced with: calling on the reader’s pity for him and for the whole family.

To conclude, we can say that Hamilton uses two strategies of argumentation: convincing and persuading.

As a consequence, after having studied Hugo Hamilton’s narrative strategy, we can say that it is a little complex but that is also part of what makes the reader feel part of the novel.

Quentin, Vahé & Valentin

Meaning of home

In his book Hugo Hamilton shares his childhood, between Germany and Ireland. He is looking for his own identity, that's why the meaning of home is very important there.

In Hugo Hamilton’s work there is a sort of obsession with identity and with what constitutes it : language, memory, the past, heritage and nationhood are interlinked with home and displacement. His writing is characterised by a continuous and pervasive exploration of both personal and shared identity. In line with the Irish tradition, personal identity is continuously related and tightly connected to national identity. Personal identity is always at stake, and Hanno, the young protagonist of The Speckled People, relates himself repeatedly to his father: “You always have to walk like yourself, not like your father or the crabs, just like yourself.”

In the 20^th chapter, the family travels to Connemara and arrives during the evening. There, the family finally fits in a community: the mother gives German lessons while the father speaks Irish all the time, without hearing any word in English. The child really enjoys Connemara. Indeed, he describes it as “ the place where we all wanted to be for the rest of our lives”. In Connemara, they met unusual people who didn't speak English at all, and who could “remember as far back as infinity”. The kid and his family are also surprised by the beauty of everything they see : they discover wonderful landscapes, which are simple. They describe them as the most beautiful things they've ever seen. They describe the area by telling that it is “rich with nothing”. One day, the father tells during a speech in Connemara, that the Irish language is still alive and that it is an important thing. Even after a small incident, nobody makes fun of the father.

In fact, meanings of home and idendity are different according to the young protagonist and his family : they show us that it depends on the place where you live, the people who surround you...

Hugo's mother compensates her homesickness for Germany by dressing her sons in lederhosen, maintaining German Christmas traditions, basically creating a German domestic life for her family within the confines of their home. Meanwhile, after spending many years in Ireland, she doesn't recognize anything when she goes back there : “ she was lost, she couldn't recognize anything.”

The protagonist is continuously moving from Germany to Ireland , continuously displaced. When they were in Germany, all the family felt better : "Nobody would ever call us Nazis. My father would have lots more friends and my mother would have all her sisters to talk to."

In his work Hugo Hamilton tries to make us understand that it is difficult to find our own identity when we are torn between two different cultures. “We’re trying to go home now. We’re still trying to find our way home, but sometimes it’s hard to know where that is any more.”

Julie J, Marie, Mégane, Samantha & Sophie

Theme : Laguage and Secrets

The Speckled People is a book published in 2003. The author, Hugo Hamilton, was born in Dublin in 1953, he has published five novels and a collection of short stories. He tells us in his original book his own story, his childhood in Dublin torn apart between a sweet German mother and a hard Irish nationalist father. But, further from the tale of his life when he was a little boy, this book also reveals the story of his battle for identity strongly linked to languages. Hugo Hamilton says in his book : "We sleep in German and dream in Irish” : he built himself around English which is the official language of Ireland, German spoken by his mother and Irish made compulsory by his father. Moreover, Hugo Hamilton's childhood is filled with secrets and we learn all along the book clues to elucidate his mother and father's secrets. We can focus on those themes : secrets and languages in The Speckled people which are central to understand the whole book and to understand what the childhood of the author was.

Firstly, we can study the language that the author uses to tell his story. Hugo Hamilton uses different writing proses. With a child's words, he transports us to a violent universe through the eyes of a little boy. The syntax is very simple as we can notice, all along the book. For example the first sentences are “When you’re small you know nothing. When I was small I woke up in Germany. [...] Then I got up and looked out the window and saw Ireland.” : these are simple, short sentences, without ponctuation, as a child might say. Indeed, the entire story is narrated from the point of view of a naïve but observing child, with a specific and simple vocabulary.

He writes over the pen, but he keeps a chronological sense, such as when he tells the history of his mother. First in chapter 8 he talks about how her family flew the crises to go to Brazil, then how she had to go back to Europe and live with her Onkel Gerd, and the problems he had with the Nazi party. In chapters 15, 17 or 22, he writes about wen his mother began to work, what the Nazis did and what happened to her in Venlo. He observes and registers many of these incidents as a child, without knowing their significance. The reader, with a little knowledge of the period, is able to draw the right conclusions, although as the author matures, he begins to understand all the events he has narrated.

Secondly, we will focus on the role of the language within the plot and the author’s chlildhood. When he was a child, Hamilton was obligated to speak Irish with his father and German with his mother. However, he lived in Ireland where the official language was English. Thus, he had to speak English with his classmates or the grocer, for example. It was really difficult for a young child and sometimes he met difficulties about it. Besides, he created some specific “passwords” with his brother, some English expressions that he used only with him.

In addition, he was persecuted because he spoke German with his brother. As a matter of fact, the scene took place after the Second World War, and Nazism was still anchored in people’s minds. So, he was sometimes given nicknames such as “Hitler” or “a nazi”. Nevertheless, as he was young and innocent, he didn't really suffer from it. His mother told him to surrender, he wasn't culprit.

Furthermore, his mother doesn't really talk all along the book, we don’t know exactly what she feels. For example, in chapter 1, she is crying and laughing at the same time during a family walk. But, even if she is very silent, she always wants to relate her past which the narrator calls the “film”. In fact, she is a caring mother, using hugs and making cakes to give her children love.

We can notice that the book is written in English. It may be a way to go back to this problem or to “defy” his father because he hated this language, as he was an Irish nationalist.

Indeed, amongst the several languages mentioned in the book, one is particularly important to the narrator’s father’s eyes: Irish. Loving his country, Ireland, the most beautiful of all, he is obviously a nationalist. But Ireland isn’t free, his loved country is losing little by little his culture because it has been a British colony for a long time. Therefore, the enemy is already designed : England.

Hugo Hamilton draws for us the image of a fanatic Irish nationalist who refuses every form of British culture : he is leading a real struggle with his orator’s qualities when he holds speeches. One day, he decides to encourage Irish people, who are used to speaking English, to speak Gaelic which is the traditional Irish language. He thinks that all the names of the streets have been changed to English names, so he decides to write the Gaelic names of the streets on the signs.

This fanaticism can also be seen in the relations he has with his own family. He doesn’t allow his children to speak the language of the enemy. They are only allowed to communicate in Irish, or in German with their mother. He uses his children as a weapon to restore the Irish language, as it is said in chapter 15. And either they speak Irish, or get knackered if they speak English.

All this exacerbated nationalism fits the narrator’s goal of reporting the awkward situation he lived with the different languages he knew when he was young. This situation influenced his way to write The Speckled People as well as the way he grew up.

The notion of secrets is also very important in this work. The parents of the narrator both have secrets that are more or less hidden.

To begin, the father has several secrets. His personality is complicated to reach and to grasp. At the beginning we just consider him as a hard father strongly nationalist. But thanks to his secrets we understand better who this main character is.

We learn about his secrets right from chapter 2, with the plot of the wardrobe which is recurrent. Indeed, the past of Jack (the narrator's father) is hidden in that wardrobe. The narrator, one day disobeyed his father, and with his brother and sister opened and entered it to find the picture of a British sailor, who was Jack's father. We learn later, in chapter 12, that the narrator's grandfather had fought with the British during the First World War, before the independence of Ireland. But after he fell down on a boat, he became insane and didn't remember who he was. But the British marines didn't accept to pay the regular rent to Jack's mother, who as a result became poor and had to leave her house with her two sons : Jack and “Ted”. It's one of the several reasons which lead Jack to force his children to speak only Irish and not English, that he hates.

But it's not the only secret of the narrator's father. We learn that Jack has been a redactor in a nationalist newspaper: the Aiséiri. But we find out thanks to Gearoid (a friend of Jack’s), in chapter 26, that he wrote just before the Second World War an anti-Jewish article. And the reader discovers that secret at the same time as the mother does. That’s why she is very angry toward her husband : “ After that my mother was very upset and she didn't even do the washing-up.” There were secrets between both parents.

The reader also finds out that Jack, who always said to his children that he was lame because he had the polio when he was young, actually lied. It was just a birth deformity.

So, the father's past represents a huge secret which is amongst the governing principles of that book.

Another of the most striking secrets in The Speckled People is the mother’s secret. It is suggested that she was raped by her employer when she was nineteen. To tell this part of her life to her children, the mother uses a metaphor and says she has lived a “bad film” when she was in Germany. We learn the entire story as we go along the book : at the beginning, she only tells a part of it : “She was in a building where there was nobody else living. [...] She heard the man coming and there was nothing she could do exept pray and hope that it would be all over some day.” (chapter 3). Thus, we can’t really know what happend to her, even if we can make hypotheses : we are placed in the situation of the children, who are too young to understand. It is only by reading the next chapters that the story is told in its whole. And even though lots of details are given, the rape is not totally explicit : for instance the word “rape” is never mentionned. This obviously must be due to the childlike point of view the narrator sets ; at this point the reader is like the children who know from now on what happend to their mother, perhaps without fully understanding it. But this device also insists on the notions of secret and inuendos.

We learn that the mother was forced to keep the rape she had lived a secret. Indeed, her employer and agressor Herr Stiegler made her understand that she should not tell anything to the authorities, for he had connexions in the Gestapo, therefore they would never believe her : “It wasn’t a good idea for her to contact them because he had too many friends in the Gestapo. They would never believe her.” (chapter 19). Besides, Frau Stiegler, her employer’s wife, refused to believe her and threatened her to tell the police too if anybody learnt about this story : “If you say a single word to me or to anyone about this, [...] I will call the police insantly.” ( chapter 22)

We can say that this story is a secret, but at the same time it is not : the mother can’t talk about it but she doesn’t want it to remain unknown forever. So she writes down those “things that you can’t say in a song, or a story, only on the typewriter for people to read later” (chapter 17). She wants her children to know about it, but as they’re too young to be told such a story, she wants them to read it when they grow up. Therefore, one can infer that the narrator tells a story that he has not heard yet as a child, since his mother has not told it to him, and he has not read her writing yet. Consequently, it may be the narrator as an adult who tells his mother’s secret, but through the child’s eyes he uses throughout the book, almost as a catharsis for the adult he has become.

The mother’s secret is like something that’s haunting her all the time : “It was only something that she could not put out of her head. [...] Sometimes it was there on the back of her mind.” (chapter 17) and that she needs to tell, so that this memory would finally go away : “She had almost put [it] away by writing it down in a diary.” (chapter 19). Any single thing that has, one way or another, a link with her secret, makes her think about it, such as smoke ; any time she finds herself alone, she thinks about it. That is why it has a big influence on her life, her family’s life and their way to act.

All in all, those secrets are very important elements in the book, because they have an influence on the children, the way they see ther parents, the way they grow up.

As a conclusion, we can say that languages and secrets in The Speckled Pople are linked to one another : the secrets create tensios around the languages, and those tensions create even more secrets. Moreover, they both have a huge importance within the history of the family : they come to mean a lot of changes in the childhood of the characters and their family life, but also the way the entire book was written.

 Emma, Julie L, Julien & Zoé